


with our own hands we'll take it back

by rinwins



Category: Durarara!!, Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, I'm writing this for myself but y'all can read it too, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, you don't need to know durarara!! to read this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:01:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29948310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rinwins/pseuds/rinwins
Summary: Underground doctor Luke Skywalker gets a surprise visitor at terrible-thirty in the morning-- the notorious Steel Rider, who apparently isnotjust an urban legend, plus a mysterious kid with abilities Luke really wishes he didn't recognize. They need his help, but they come with a whole pack of trouble at their heels-- impossible magic, mad science, conspiracies and cover-ups, crime lords and biker gangs, and Luke's own family history catching up with him at last.Things might get weird, but honestly? It'd be hard to make this city much weirder.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
Comments: 41
Kudos: 63





	1. Terrible-Thirty In The Morning

**Author's Note:**

> You don't -need- to know Durarara!! to read this, I'm just borrowing the general setting and a whole lot of tropes, might be a bonus though. I have no idea how much of this there will be or how far momentum will carry me through it, but I have a Lot of ideas so We'll See.
> 
> Title is a translation from the DRRRx2 opening track, HEADHUNT

He could have been a  _ regular _ doctor, like his mother had wanted when he was a kid. He could work in a real clinic, where he didn’t have to move operations every two weeks and carefully scrub the location coordinates from the internet each time; he wouldn’t get shot at or stabbed or occasionally bitten, or at least probably not nearly as often; people probably wouldn’t bang on his own personal door at three-something in the morning, and he probably wouldn’t have to answer it holding a sword.

“How did you get this address,” Luke calls through the door.

“Talk later,” says the voice on the other side. It’s gravelly, distorted. Kind of hoarse. He doesn’t recognize it. “Not much time.”

He hefts the sword in his good hand, opens the door  _ just _ a crack. Just enough to see who it is.

The next second, he’s fumbling with the chain lock to open it properly, because  _ holy hell it’s the Steel Rider _ .

“Help him,” says the Steel Rider, thrusting a bundle toward him.

Luke hastily deposits the sword in the umbrella stand and takes the bundle, because when an indestructible six-foot metal-plated urban legend gives you something you damn well take it. The bundle’s warm. Something stirs inside it. Something  _ alive _ ? He backs up quickly in the narrow entry. The other man comes the rest of the way inside, closes and locks the door behind him without being asked.

He is  _ covered _ in blood.

“You’re covered in blood,” Luke says. Well, he was asleep five minutes ago, he can’t be blamed if his mouth hasn’t caught up with his brain yet.

The man-- he  _ thinks _ there’s a man under the silver helmet with its opaque visor, the battered motorcycle jacket, the body armor sewn with steel plates-- spares a quick glance down at himself. “It’s fine,” he says. “It’s not all mine. Help the kid first.”

Right. The bundle. Luke doesn’t particularly want to leave a stranger bleeding onto his doormat, but when an indestructible six-foot, yadda yadda, anyway. He sweeps back into the apartment and sits the bundle down gently on the nearest accessible flat surface, which is a bit of the kitchen counter.

There  _ is _ a kid in there. Luke folds the fabric of the bundle over to make a pillow for him. Looks maybe two years old, weighs about half what a kid that age ought to. He’s kind of… green. Not a mark on him, but he’s unconscious. 

“Gotta get my kit,” Luke says, and pelts for his bedroom, his bathrobe trailing open behind him.

The Steel Rider is still standing in place when he comes back, as if guarding the door against an attack. Luke makes a gesture toward the living room, well, the general living area, but he doesn’t budge. Fine. Luke goes back to the kid.

His breathing is shallow, but consistent and clear; his heartbeat is slow, but steady. His temperature’s low, his skin is cool to the touch.

“He’s always like that,” says the Steel Rider, and Luke realizes he’s been thinking out loud. 

“Tell me what happened,” he says.

“We were ambushed,” the other man replies, as if unwilling to admit it. “They had trip lines, some kind of armored truck. I couldn’t fight them.”

Luke blinks. “Fight who?”

“Troopers,” the man says.

Somehow, Luke doesn’t think he means the city traffic cops. This night just gets better and better.

“How’d you get away?” he says.

“The kid. Picked up the whole damn truck, threw it at ‘em.” Damn. “Took them out long enough for us to get away.”

“Picked up?” says Luke, although he  _ knows _ he doesn’t mean the kid lifted an armored truck with his arms.  _ Damn _ . 

“Don’t know how. Like--” The Steel Rider holds out a leather-gloved hand in the air in front of him, fingers spread out, a vague gesture which Luke nevertheless recognizes.

Yeah,  _ this _ is why he’s an underground doctor instead.

“Well,” he says, brightly, “the good news is, he’s going to be fine. He’ll sleep for maybe a day, then he’ll be good as new.”

The helmet swivels toward him. “You’ve seen this before?”

“You can stay here until he’s rested,” says Luke, neatly dodging the question.

“No,” the Steel Rider says immediately, moving to pick up the child, “we shouldn’t. They might still be looking for us--”

“You are  _ bleeding _ ,” says Luke. “I should treat  _ you _ \--”

“You’ve done enough--”

“ _ Sit _ ,” says Luke. He intercepts the man with a hand on his armored chest-- metal clicks against metal-- and deflects him toward the couch. Apparently stunned by the sudden command, he goes.

“Now  _ stay _ there,” Luke says. “And get the jacket and vest off. I need to see where you’re hurt.”

He really has nowhere good to move the kid. He settles for a section of rug out of the way, with his blanket under him and hedged in with cushions from the chair. That’ll have to be good enough, it’s not like he’s going anywhere.

When he turns back to the couch, he’s a little stunned himself.

Okay, there was enough blood that he should have expected some flesh to go with it. And he had been, kind of, but deducing the probable existence of a living person underneath the leather and metal wasn’t nearly the same thing as  _ seeing _ him. On his couch. The Steel Rider, faceless figure of mystery, scourge of the city’s underworld, whose existence Luke couldn’t have confirmed or denied before tonight, is a real actual person with brown skin and a solid frame and he’s sitting on Luke’s couch.

And getting rather a lot of blood on it. And Luke kind of liked that couch, too. 

This is rapidly approaching too much. He really needs to focus.

Injuries from street fights are, unfortunately, familiar territory. He focuses on that. The man has a couple nasty welts across his arms and midsection, probably from the trip wires he mentioned. Luke guesses he has his body armor to thank for the fact that they aren’t lacerations. A lot of bruising, a rib that might be cracked. He hisses quietly, once or twice, as Luke cleans him up, but most of the fight seems to have gone out of him, as if it was contained in his outer layers.

The worst of it is a long cut, high up on his neck, where something sharp must have found the gap between his high collar and his helmet. That seems to be the source of most of the blood. Luke’s amazed it didn’t hit the artery. He reaches for the helmet--

\--and the man catches his hands before he can lift it. “You can’t,” he says.

Luke frowns. “I have to clean that cut,” he retorts. “And you might have head injuries--”

“You  _ can’t _ ,” he repeats. God, he sounds wrecked. But his grip on Luke’s hands is firm. “I can’t show my face.”

“Okay,” Luke says, giving up. “Okay. Just don’t die on me.”

“Don’t worry,” he manages, “I’m hard to kill.”

He does the best he can cleaning and bandaging the wound. The man must have been telling the truth, a lot of the blood really  _ wasn’t _ his.

But, Luke realizes, with slowly dawning horror, he’d said he fought Troopers…

“Hey,” he says, but the Steel Rider doesn’t respond. His helmeted head is tipped back on the arm of the couch, his chest is rising and falling almost imperceptibly. He’s unconscious.

Damn,  _ damn _ . The scale of the night’s events tips all the way over to  _ too much _ . Luke reacts in the way he usually does, which is to mentally take the metaphorical scale and dump everything out of it. There’s another way.

If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that there’s  _ always _ another way.


	2. Day One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Steel Rider starts his day on an unusual note. Meanwhile, some city residents have a group chat.

He wakes up. Not, in itself, a problem.

The problem is that he’s on an unfamiliar piece of furniture, looking at an unfamiliar ceiling, and he doesn’t remember taking his helmet off to sleep, and yet. It’s off.

He locates it immediately (on the side table right next to him) and puts it back on. Then he can breathe. Next he locates the kid-- sleeping soundly, in a makeshift nest on the floor. Now he can breathe easily.

There’s a voice coming from somewhere. The doctor. He follows it.

He finds him out on a tiny balcony, overlooking a view that’s mostly back alleys and other people’s roofs, talking to someone on the phone. “--telling you, Leia, there’s something we don’t know,” he’s saying. “This might go higher up than--”

“ _ What did you do _ ,” he says.

“Oh. I have to go, it sounds like my patient is awake. I’ll call you back.” The doctor turns, and he realizes-- he’s wearing a sleep mask over his eyes like a blindfold.

The next thing he was going to say was going to be “What the hell,” but the words don’t quite make it to his mouth.

“You said you couldn’t show your face,” the doctor says, “so I didn’t look. Are you decent now?”

“Yeah,” he manages.

“I am sorry,” the other man continues, stuffing the sleep mask into a pocket of his voluminous bathrobe. “If there had been another option, I would have taken it, but I had to make sure you’d live through the night. I hope I didn’t upset anything too serious.”

There are dark circles under his blue eyes-- did he sleep at all?-- and his blond hair is all on one one side, and there’s blood on his robe-- whoops-- but he looks earnest, and curious, and  _ young _ . 

“I told you,” he says, “I’m hard to kill.” He holds out his arm as evidence.

The young man sweeps forward, instantly interested. “May I?” he says, and then his hands-- one flesh, one metal prosthetic-- are on his arm. The bruises are significantly faded already, the welts from the trap line have gone down by half.

“Accelerated healing,” the doctor breathes, fingers brushing over his skin almost reverently. “Incredible. I’ve never seen it in action--” he turns his arm over, firm but gentle; carefully lays his flesh and blood hand over the cracked rib-- the rib that  _ had _ been cracked. “ _ Incredible _ ,” he says again.

Then he looks up, and those blue eyes are suddenly piercing. “Does this have something to do with  _ why _ you can’t show your face?”

Incredible, indeed. Worrying, honestly. That’s not a connection he likes people to make.

“Yeah,” he says again.

“I have  _ so _ many questions. Would you mind? We probably have most of the day, I can make you something to eat, uh, if that’s allowed. I’m Luke. By the way.”

He probably shouldn’t trust him. It’s not a survival tactic in his line of work. Even if he did help him, and even if he does seem to know something about the kid, which is more than he can say for himself. He shouldn’t stay here.

“Din,” he says. 

Luke’s smile lights up his entire face, dark circles, bedhead and all. Something in his chest constricts in a way that has nothing to do with cracked ribs or bruises. He can’t remember the last time anyone looked at him like that.

“I won’t tell,” he replies with a zipper-lips gesture. Another worrying insight. This could really be a problem.

“So,” says Luke, “breakfast? Coffee? I’ve got straws somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Din says, “coffee’s good.”

  
  
-

\---- CHATOOINE v2.2 - group chat with your friends! ----

Vanthage: hey you guys see this? some kind of throwdown on the H-2 last night

WhatsAMotto: Yeah, I know it screwed my delivery routes this morning :/

DuneBuggy: heard the cops cleared some bodies off the road. think it was biker gangs?

Kargo: Nah, there was an armored truck turned over, my money’s on the mob.

Vanthage: tbh? I heard it was Troopers

Kargo: Come on, that’s a hoax. You read too much clickbait.

Vanthage: easy for you to say, you didn’t see what happened on Pelgo St last month

WhatsAMotto: Whatever it was, they still have half the road blocked

Kargo: That why I didn’t get my delivery today?

WhatsAMotto: No, that’s just because I don’t like you :P

Kargo: Har har.

DuneBuggy: maybe somebody should check it out? could be something sketchy

BlackFox: I wouldn’t.

Vanthage: ??

WhatsAMotto: You’re still alive?

BlackFox: Cute. But seriously, don’t.

Kargo: Coming from you? You’d have been the first one to go look.

BlackFox: Things change. There are some situations it’s better to leave alone.


End file.
